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My First Mobile App

For the past few months I’ve been working on a mobile application for work. While it’s nothing fancy, considering the fact that I had no experience with mobile development when I started, I think this first version of the app turned out pretty well. Although the real test will come as the number of users increases.

The journey from concept to initial version has been fun, interesting, and educational as well as filled with frustrations and roadblocks along long the way. This post is only an introduction to a series of posts that I’m planning on writing to document a bit of the journey. For now I just want to tell you a little about the app.

The app is geared towards scientists who use the data from the NASA mission I work on, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, although there is nothing that prevents others from using the app to see what is going on. As part of the mission, we provide a variety of “high level” data on various sources as well as publish alerts and news about sources and events in the gamma-ray sky. The goal of the app was to aggregate some of this information onto the computer you’re always carrying with you and make it available even when you are off-line for some reason.

Currently the application provides access for four bits of data:

Light curves of monitored gamma-ray sources – These are sources that we’ve either been monitoring since the beginning of the mission or which have flared up to be very bright since launch and we’ve been monitoring since they first crossed a predefined luminosity threshold.

Gamma-ray Coordinate Network (GCN) notices produced by Fermi – When there is a gamma-ray burst or other very bright transient event (e.g. solar flares among other things) the satellite sends down a real time alert about the event and its location on the sky. We aggregate these alerts to provide a summary of the best possible data for each event.

Fermi related Astronomer’s Telegrams – These are notices sent out by astronomers about objects of interest that have been detected and analyzed using the Fermi data. While there are dozens of telegrams each week, the app filters and collects the Fermi related ones.

Access to the Fermi Sky Blog – This is a weekly summary of events and objects of interest in the gamma-ray sky.

If you’re interested in checking the application out, it is called the Fermi Data Portal and is available on both the Google Play Store and the Apple AppStore and works on both phones and tablets. Check back for more about the development process and lessons learned from building the app.